


invitation

by kittenscully



Series: fictober 2020 [16]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Getting Back Together, Post-Episode: s11e07 Rm9sbG93ZXJz, The Unremarkable House (X-Files), The X-Files Revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:28:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27051190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittenscully/pseuds/kittenscully
Summary: It’s just that every time Scully excuses herself from the house after breakfast, dressed in the clean clothes he left for her, it feels just a little like she’s leaving him all over again.[fictober day 16]
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Series: fictober 2020 [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1949467
Comments: 3
Kudos: 84





	invitation

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "That's the easy part."
> 
> Sort of a follow up to Atlas (fictober day 1).

She’d woken him with a hand on his bare shoulder, wearing his sweatshirt and the jeans he’d washed for her since her last visit and left atop the armchair. The look on her face had been granite, but not unkind. Merely calm and impassive. 

“I need you to drive me to my condo,” she’d said. 

Nothing else, just that.

She’d made them coffee and let him kiss her in the kitchen, all while keeping a straight face, no indicators of emotion. But Mulder didn’t particularly need them to read her, not after twenty five years by her side. 

By the time they were out the door, the lockscreen on his phone had read eight A.M., Saturday, white numbers over a photo of the two of them on last week’s outing. The early hour alone had told him all he needed to know.

“You’ve been thinking,” he observes, glancing over to where Scully sits stiffly in his passenger seat. 

Not a push to talk to him, just an invitation. They both know that something’s up with her. Based on her firm self-moderation, he would label her excited or nervous, possibly both.

“Maybe that fancy degree of yours was worth it after all, Mulder,” she says dryly.

“Why are we going to your condo?”

“Why wouldn’t we be going to my condo?”

He should’ve known better than to expect a straight answer. He can’t help but grin a little, though, at the way her mouth twitches at her own deliberate refusal to communicate. 

“Can’t argue with you there.”

It’s a strange thing, casually dating your former life partner. They slip into domesticity at every opportunity, shared aprons and couch cushions, comfortable silence. He hugs her from behind at the sink, and when she spends the night, she steals all the covers and drools on his pillowcases. 

Sometimes, though, she’ll remember herself, take two steps back, and the sweet will turn bitter. 

Mulder respects her space, of course he does, because she deserves the best that he can offer. Straightens his spine, opens the front door for her, doesn’t guide her with his palm on her way out. Keeps his smile fond and his hands to himself, a gentleman now even if he never really was before. 

It’s just that every time Scully excuses herself from the house after breakfast, dressed in the clean clothes he left for her, it feels just a little like she’s leaving him all over again. 

Sometimes he watches her car until it vanishes into the distance. Sometimes he stands in the living room for a long while, waiting in vain for it to feel less hollow, less empty. And sometimes those things don’t cut it, and he has to shut himself in his study, imagine that it’s 2007, 2008. Tell himself that she’s just at work, because she gets to have a job, and pretend that he doesn’t miss her all that much anyway. 

It’s just that once she’s gone, he can’t shake the knowledge that there’s a chance she won’t ever come back.

Now, at the complex that she allegedly calls home, he follows three steps behind her to what remains of her condo, intrigued by her lack of upset. Standing in the doorway, she comes across steady and self-possessed, even dwarfed by his sweatshirt as she is. 

The inside is a wreck, albeit a fixable one, and he’d half expected her to blame him for it. As they survey the damage, though, he glances over to find her chin lifted, a hint of a smile that almost seems victorious on her face. 

The space, or what’s left of it, is oddly modern. Nothing about it speaks of her or her tastes, except perhaps her flair for the pricier things in life. She’d left many of her various collected items at their house when she moved out, and she doesn’t seem to have collected more since. 

“It’s a mess,” he remarks. “Can’t imagine how you’d move back in.”

Scully shrugs, says what he’s been thinking. “It didn’t suit me anyway.” 

Mulder doesn’t ask about her use of past tense, doesn’t dare to make assumptions about what she might mean. But there’s a warmth in his chest, and he hopes. 

“I doubt this kind of damage is covered by insurance,” he says.

“Definitely not,” she agrees. “But I can pay for it.”

“Gonna crash at a hotel while it’s fixed?”

He asks the question with the express purpose of letting her disagree, but she doesn’t say a word, not for a long time. 

And Mulder isn’t staring at her expectantly, but he isn’t ignoring her, either, sparing little glances every so often in an attempt to gauge her mood. 

She’d taken off her makeup the night before, leaving her bare and honest, face marked by smile and frown lines in equal measures. The idea of her aging only with the imprints of her own grief had felt wrong, and so he’d worked hard to make sure that balance existed, found ways to make her laugh in the darkest of times. 

She would’ve been beautiful either way, he knows. But she glows in her happiness, girlish and bright, and something like that deserves to be immortalized.

Now, though, she’s at the precipice of something. A decision’s been reached for the both of them, after weeks of hovering around it, and they’re only waiting for her to take the final step over the edge, plummet down and into his arms.

“Mulder,” she says, softly.

He knows, then, that she needs to be asked. And so he does. 

“Gonna stay with me?” 

She nods. 

Long overdue, some might say, but he doesn’t think so. No, it’s taken exactly as long as it needed to. 

He watches her throat bob, and then she nods again, again, again, puppet on a string. Her face is still, but her eyes are watery, lip quivering. Broken record, catching and hesitating, ashamed to make a sound. He reaches for her hand, giving it a squeeze, and she catches her breath.

More than anything, he wants her to know that there’s nothing to feel guilty for. 

“Show me your bedroom,” he tells her. “And I’ll pack you an overnight bag.”

Another nod, and Scully’s quiet sigh of relief. His heart feels overly excitable, beating fast enough to worry his doctor, were she to feel his chest. 

They don’t talk as Mulder gathers her things, because they don’t need to. 

Her drawers and closet are sparse, half of the designer clothing she now buys still stored in garment bags, and he doesn’t comment on it. In the corner, he spots a stack of what looks to be art prints, new ones, and he doesn’t ask her why she never hung them here. 

Instead, he thinks of her still-empty closet in their bedroom. Of the few walls still bare in their house, opposite the stove and a few spots in the living room. He looks up at her, leaning against the door frame with a tentative smile on her face, and imagines her on a stepstool, hammering hooks into the plaster to hang the new additions to her collection.

Instead, he swallows thickly, and tries very hard not to cry. 

When he leaves, it’s with her small frame tucked under one arm and her bag slung over the other, and so much warmth inside him that he’s sure she must feel it, too. 

“We’ll rent a moving van,” he says, holding open the passenger side door for her, palm on her lower back to guide her inside. “Tomorrow, or the day after.”

Before he can pull out of the parking lot, Scully’s hand clutches his own on the gearshift.

“Mulder,” she murmurs. She’s smiling, eyes glassy and crinkled at the corners, and he doesn’t think a human ribcage is meant to contain this sort of emotion. 

“Yeah?”

“Thank you,” she says. “For… letting me back in.”

He gives her fingers a squeeze, lets out a choked little laugh. If he has to lose her again, he doesn’t think he’ll survive it. 

“Scully,” he says, shaking his head. “That’s the easy part.”


End file.
